UL lecturer wins Bafta special award for gamemaking
Brenda Romero, who is a lecturer in games design at UL, will be presented with the Special Award at the British Academy Games Awards next Thursday.
The award acknowledges an individual for their creative contribution to the gaming industry and will be presented to Ms Romero for her advocacy for the process behind gamemaking.
“I am first and foremost grateful to Bafta for recognising the artistic potential and power of games.
“This recognition is culturally critical for games overall. So for that, I am profoundly thankful,” Ms Romero said yesterday.
“As for me? Genuinely, I am still in a state of shock, having been chosen. I’ve devoted my life to games, making them, teaching them, playing them and to receive any honour from the community is incredible. But a Bafta? It’s well beyond anything else,” she said.
Last year Ms Romero was appointed to her position in UL as the program director for their Master’s degree in Game Design and Development.
Born in New York, she was also a Fulbright Scholar in 2014 and in 2015 received the Game Developers Choice Ambassador award.
Nick Button-Brown, chairman of the Bafta games committee yesterday described her as a “great role model”.
“Brenda is such a great role model for people wanting to enter the industry and her advocacy for the excellence of creativity within the games industry helps us all,” said Mr Button-Brown.
“Given the work that Bafta does on helping people get into the games industry, having Brenda as such an eloquent advocate is fantastic,” he saied.
As a designer, Ms Romero has worked on 47 games so far in her career as well as contributing to household titles such as the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series and the Bafta-award winning Ghost Recon and Dungeons and Dragons series.
She also co-owns Romero Games, which is based in Galway.
In 2013 Ms Romero was presented with the Women in Games Lifetime Achievement award by Microsoft and in the same year, she was listed as one of the industry’s top 10 game developers in the world by Gamasutra.com.
At the time of her appointment in UL, the designer and lecturer said that she is “impressed” with Ireland’s potential in the gaming industry: “I have been impressed with the global potential for Ireland’s games industry and look forward to collaboration with Lero (the Irish software research centre) through its research projects.
“The natural creative and technical talent that Ireland is renowned for, in software, animation, music and literature is a resource that is key to developing world-class games.”
The award will be presented in London next week where nominees for other awards include Pokémon Go and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
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